Narrative Quotes - Page 23

The unique, compelling, and earnest voice that characterizes Jedediah’s weekly columns comes alive with increased vitality in OUTNUMBERED. She shatters leftist stereotypes about conservatives and exposes the myth of liberal tolerance as she relates her interactions with liberals in everyday life. This narrative, interlaced with commentary and impressions, gives us insight into liberals that books merely about abstract principles do not capture. A fascinating read.

David Limbaugh

Book, Unique, Voice

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Gesture will survive whatever kind of light you have. Gesture can triumph over anything because of its narrative content.

Jay Maisel

Photography, Light, Triumph

Jay Maisel (2014). “Light, Gesture, and Color”, p.2, New Riders

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For it is humanly certain that most of us remember very little of what we have read. To open almost any book a second time is to be reminded that we had forgotten well-nigh everything that the writer told us. Parting from the narrator and his narrative, we retain only a fading impression; and he, as it were, takes the book away from us and tucks it under his arm.

Siegfried Sassoon

Book, Narrators, Fading

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It’s easy to see why politicians would be drawn to the populist pose. First, it makes everything so simple. The economic crisis was caused by a complex web of factors, including global imbalances caused by the rise of China. But with the populist narrative, you can just blame Goldman Sachs.

David Brooks

Simple, Would Be, Rise Of China

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Incredibly deep research combines with the talents of a fine historian and writer to produce superb narrative history. The true character and relationship of these two iconic westerners emerge to suppress myth and correct more than a century of tomes laden with bad history.

Robert M. Utley

Character, Two, Research

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Music and film are parallel experiences: they are linear, they are narrative.

Todd Haynes

Film, Linear, Parallels

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We all have an ongoing narrative inside our heads, the narrative that is spoken aloud if a friend asks a question. That narrative feels deeply natural to me. We also hang on to scraps of dialogue. Our memories don’t usually serve us up whole scenes complete with dialogue. So I suppose I’m saying that I like to work from what a character is likely to remember, from a more interior place.

Lydia Davis

Memories, Character, Ongoing

"Lydia Davis: I am simply not interested, at this point, in creating narrative scenes between characters". Interview with Sarah Manguso, www.believermag.com. January, 2008.

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In Red Flags, Juris Jurjevics has brilliantly accomplished a feat that is becoming a major characteristic of 21st century literature: the seamless combining of a genre form with the deep resonance of literary art. This book is thrilling to read for both its narrative drive and its insight into the human heart.

Robert Olen Butler

Art, Book, Red Flags

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Refuse to accept the narrative of history laid down by presidents, prime ministers, generals and journalists.

Robert Fisk

President, Accepting, Prime

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But I suspect that all writers come up with premises of some kind, fragments of narrative or scenarios, in the course of a working week.

Nick Hornby

Kind, Week, Come Up

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From its aptly noirish title on, Martin Preib's The Wagon has rightness of authenticity about it. From the perspective of a cop he fashions a compelling view of the Chicago Algren once called 'the dark city.' There's a unique quality to his essays which manage to be broodingly meditative even as their narrative drive keeps you turning pages.

Stuart Dybek

Fashion, Dark, Unique

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Juliet is one of those rare novels that has it all: lush prose, tightly intertwined parallel narratives, intrigue, and historical detail all set against a backdrop of looming danger. Anne Fortier casts a new light on one of history's greatest stories of passion. I was swept away.

Sara Gruen

Passion, Light, Historical

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If you think of even Tolstoy or a book like 'Anna Karenina,' you go from character to character, and each section is from the third person perspective of a different character, so you get to see the whole world a little more kaleidoscopically that way. That's traditional narrative manner, and I haven't done a book like that before, but I enjoyed it.

Jeffrey Eugenides

Book, Character, Thinking

Interview with Juliette Lewis, www.interviewmagazine.com. September 24, 2011.

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When it came time to make the audiobook, Audible did an ingenious thing: they asked both Wil Wheaton and Amber Benson to record entire versions of the book. As the author, I'm impressed with Audible's commitment to my narrative -- and I'm geeking out that both Wil and Amber are reading my book. This is fantastic.

John Scalzi

Reading, Book, Commitment

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If there's a narrative, I want it in the flesh.

Jenny Saville

Flesh, Want, Ifs

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Like Flannery O'Connor, McCorkle's genius is to give us both philosophical speculation and a riveting narrative filled with unforgettable characters. Great writing, poignancy, humor, wisdom-all are in abundance here. Jill McCorkle is one of the South's greatest writers; she is also one of America's.

Ron Rash

Philosophical, Writing, Character

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After a while, a surprising theme emerged. The single most important thing you can do for your family may be the simplest of all: Develop a strong family narrative.

Bruce Feiler

Strong, Important, May

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A play's got to be a dramatic event, not a lyrical event. It's not music, it's not poetry, it's not dance, it's not narrative - it's dramaticit's about conflict. It's about forces coming together.

Romulus Linney

Play, Together, Events

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In all the history of the boxing game, you'll find no human interest story to compare with the life narrative of James J. Braddock.

Damon Runyon

Games, Boxing, Stories

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When serious people of good faith disagree, they've got to go back into the narratives and come at it again. One of the problems in the church is that people are not willing to do that. People have arrived at a place where they think they have got the answer.

Walter Brueggemann

Thinking, People, Church

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A specter is haunting the cinema: the specter of narrative. If that apparition is an Angel, we must embrace it; and if it is a Devil, then we must cast it out. But we cannot know what it is until we have met it face to face.

Hollis Frampton

Angel, Devil, Faces

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There's a logic to dreams that doesn't necessarily follow linear narrative. You don't know why things happen, it's your subconscious pushing you, to give you information.

Justin Theroux

Dream, Giving, Why Things Happen

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A myth is a way of making sense in a senseless world. Myths are narrative patterns that give significance to our existence. Whether the meaning of existence is only what we put into life by our own individual fortitude, as Sartre would hold, or whether there is a meaning we need to discover, as Kierkegaard would state, the result is the same: myths are our way of finding this meaning and significance.

Rollo May

Giving, World, Patterns

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One measure of the greatness of a work is that the characters who play roles in the narrative feel its essential truth. As someone who is proud to have been there during much of the action David Sepkoski describes, I give his description and analysis of the history of paleobiology a five-star rating; to my mind, this actually was the way it was.

Niles Eldredge

Stars, Character, Greatness

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The silencing of the Haitian Revolution is only a chapter within a narrative of global domination. It is part of the history of the West and it is likely to persist, even in attenuated form, as long as the history of the West is not retold in ways that bring forward the perspective of the world.

Michel-Rolph Trouillot

Long, Perspective, World

Michel-Rolph Trouillot (2015). “Silencing the Past (20th anniversary edition): Power and the Production of History”, p.73, Beacon Press

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